Candle in the storm
by AmandaFriend
Summary: Speculation for season 7 finale. A series of vignettes exploring the various possibilities.
1. Chapter 1

**Candle in the storm**

_**Author's Note:**__ With all the sweetness that is Bones this seventh season, I fear that angst is right around the corner. I am going to use this story to propose several scenarios that I envision might happen in the seventh season finale or as a result of the finale. SN has said that a "beloved character" would be affected somehow and that the beginning of season 8 would be changed circumstances for a time. There are theories afloat out there as to what might happen and I'm just throwing in my two cents here. _

_I don't own Bones and I don't have any idea if anything I'm suggesting here will happen. It's all conjecture, baby. _

oOo

It just felt too good.

A baby slumbering on the couch next to her exhausted mother, both looking far too cute in sleep.

It had been a hard case, a long hard grind for both of them and while neither of them had had as much time as they would have liked with the baby, it had been harder on Brennan. She'd managed to skirt Cam's rules (and government regulations) by bringing the baby into her office while she worked in the bone room. She'd managed daily trips to daycare to nurse her child.

She'd managed.

And she'd managed to break open the case in typical Bones fashion. That giant brain of hers had never given up.

She'd put the pieces together, quoted some obscure text suggesting a means for the poison to be administered to not just the one victim, but to the other potential victims in the firm and she had not only solved the case, but saved lives.

And they had come to his office—those who could walk—and they had wanted to meet the genius woman scientist who had saved them.

He sat on the floor beside the couch and ran his fingers along the tiny fingers of his daughter, sketching her hand with his. It was hard to believe this miniature person would grow into someone as lovely as her mother, someone as brilliant as her. But he had little doubt.

j

"There's room up here, Booth."

His partner's eyes drank him in and he wondered how he had become so lucky.

"I've got the best seat in the house."

In her answering smile he saw the woman behind the walls, the woman who had been lurking just beyond his reach—anyone's reach—for so long. He found it interesting that he could see her softening around some of the people in their lives—Cam, Sweets, even Caroline—but she seemed to reserve the very soft, very emotional woman for him and their daughter.

"I just wanted to hold her," she murmured. "I didn't get a chance to hold her much this week."

Her arm, carefully tucked around the baby, curled protectively around her as she played her fingers along the side of her face. He wondered if she had the same urge he had at times to wake Christine to see the small changes she'd made in sleep, to see the personality beneath her toothless smile.

"Why don't we bring her into bed with us?" he asked.

He'd managed more sleep than she, managed to celebrate the end of the case with the squints while she had finished some project for the Jeffersonian board. She'd insisted everyone leave her behind with Christine.

He doubted she'd stayed behind just for the Jeffersonian board.

"I don't really want to move right now, Booth."

She almost purred the words, purred with a contentment that he had had a hand in.

His fingers touched hers along the crown of their daughter's head and for a moment he wondered if his back would be up for carrying the two of them upstairs to bed.

Brennan's eyes fluttered and he marveled at how she seemed to fight sleep with the same determination as their daughter.

Then Bones' eyes opened wide. "There's that hockey match you wanted to watch."

The only TV in the house was the one mounted above the fireplace. No, that wasn't true. A smaller set, Bones' set that had done its duty in her closet, had been designated for the basement and the workroom that might someday become his man cave. It already had his old refrigerator waiting to house a storehouse of beer and an assortment of snacks and a chair that Bones had donated to his cause.

"It's only a playoff game," he said. But she had grown in the past few months, learned to read him better than he'd thought her capable, and she just surprised him again and rose from her position on the couch and sat up without disturbing the baby.

"I can take her upstairs," she offered, "so you could watch your game."

"Naw," he countered, "I'll take her upstairs. Unless you want to sleep."

It took her a millisecond to choose, and the small shake of her head told him she chose him.

"Hey, there," he said as he stood and scooped up his daughter, "we're going for a ride."

He caught that imperceptible tilt of Brennan's head, that look which he always thought was her look of wonderment, of "how the hell did I get here, and will I ever have to leave" look. He swore he saw the same look on his face in the morning as he shaved, Brennan humming in the baby's room as she nursed or fussed or proved just how great she was as a mother. And a partner.

And just how damned lucky he was.

He padded upstairs, Christine barely moving in his arms, her sleep deep and untroubled. Maybe in a few more weeks they'd be battling through teething, but for now they were just dealing with feedings and baths and wet and messy diapers. He couldn't even consider those a burden as he laid his daughter in her crib and adjusted the camera.

"Sleepy sleep, my little one," he whispered. "Let me have mommy for a little bit, okay?"

While he might hope for a sign of her understanding later, for now he was content that she was still asleep, still out for the count. He didn't doubt that they'd get through the game uninterrupted, but he'd take what he could get.

Despite the game about to begin downstairs, he lingered and raised a prayer of thanks.

He was truly blessed.

oOo

_**Author's note:**__ That's the premise: Life's good, bad things are about to happen to good people. My intention is to simply suggest scenarios and as it is, I have a couple of theories for some of the main characters. If any of you are also speculating about how Pellant will torment our squint squad, feel free to join me in exercising our imaginations in this, our own little mental gymnasium. Who knows? We might get something right. _

_By the way, I ran across a good story by timeaftertime09 called "The Strength in the Sorrow" that deals with the Pellant threat and seems to be a story if that's more your thing. Mine is intended to be vignettes about the various characters and how they are affected by Pellant's actions. _


	2. Booth: Switching partners

**Booth: Switching partners**

**A/N: Okay, you know how you think, gee, I have a couple of weeks before some of the information leaks about the upcoming finale and then, boom, you don't? I've always had lousy timing, I guess.**

**This was written prior to the press release and, frankly, it's a pretty good story/theory, so here it is. **

**Don't own Bones, but if I did, I wouldn't be writing these things, now, would I?**

**oOo**

Only that morning they'd been dancing.

He'd already put Christine in her stroller, already polished off the last of his coffee when she appeared in the kitchen. He couldn't say what made him do it—the way her hair seemed to fall from her shoulders, the way the dress hung from her hips or moved as she walked. He couldn't really say.

All he knew as he pulled her into his arms and began dancing with her was that he could hear the music, he could sense the rhythmic beats driving his feet.

"Booth," she'd laughed. And she had smiled.

God, he loved that smile.

There was no crime to be solved, no rotting corpses to be examined—just the two of them. No, just the three of them.

Christine watched them, her amusement played out in her face that seemed to radiate joy as he began to sway with Brennan around the room.

He could still feel Bones in his arms, still hear her protests that they had to go.

But they had nowhere to go. Nowhere to be, but there.

For those moments he had her in his arms and they were swaying and twirling around the kitchen in a lazy pattern, dancing to no tune but the one in his head, Christine clapping her hands in encouragement.

And he told her he loved her.

The kiss she had given him in reply was filled with hope and joy and a promise of more kisses to come.

And by all rights, she should be able to keep that promise.

Just that morning they were simply Brennan and Booth, Temperance and Seeley, two children playing at being adults, dancing around the kitchen to the growing laughter of their child, ignorant of the mangled body left behind by Chris Pellant.

For it had to be Pellant.

He sat back in the chair and felt the overwhelming urge to push his back hard against the metal and vinyl and rip apart the welds of the thing and use the shattered bits of metal to pummel Pellant until he was a sticky, gooey mess of bone and flesh. An inhuman act for an inhuman creature.

He fought back the despair just as he had been fighting tears for the past few hours, just as he had been fighting back the alternating waves of anger.

He scanned his watch, checked the time again and wondered if it was Mrs. Noonan who was handing off his daughter to Angela. He'd made the exchange a hundred times himself, could almost feel the joy of his daughter in his arms—fussing, sleeping, crying, laughing, smiling—it made no difference. He always felt the overwhelming sense of love in those moments, the overwhelming sense of responsibility to keep her safe and make her welcome.

His left wrist ached, held down as it was by the handcuff attached to the chair's leg. Agent Shaw had looked apologetic as Jackson and Mahoney had put him in this room and Hacker had ordered him handcuffed to the chair.

Closing his eyes only brought back the whole mess and he blinked away the image.

He studied the flesh on his right knuckles. Somehow he had torn the flesh on Pellant's cheekbone. Or maybe he had hurt it in the struggle when the other agents had pulled him off the bastard.

He'd threatened and intimidated, but he had never punched a suspect purely out of hatred and rage. But he had acted on pure emotion then and right now he cared little about what the FBI would do to him. Right now he only cared about his family and protecting it.

By now Angela or Cam had contacted Russ and told him what had happened. Russ would get in touch with Max and then there would be hell to pay.

Or maybe not. Maybe he should just step back and let Max at him.

But Bones wouldn't like it. Cam had called it—the woman could be utterly, exasperatingly objective about just about everything, including this, and he did not doubt that bringing Pellant down—not hunting him down—would best honor her.

When the knock on the door came, he straightened and watched as the parade of suits entered, Hacker followed by Sweets and Jackson and Mahoney.

"Agent Booth," Hacker began, his face eerily somber, "officially we're placing you on suspension pending a service review. I'm suspending a formal reading of the charges right now pending that review and a review of your actions today."

Booth rubbed his wrist as Jackson released him.

"For the record, you are to stay away from Christopher Pellant. I need your word on that." Hacker almost looked like one of those tough-guy G-men in one of Bones' black and white movies. "Or I will arrest you on a felony assault charge and you won't see Christine until she's in kindergarten."

Hacker knew how to intimidate and threaten, too.

"I won't go after Pellant."

He said the words slowly, carefully, but everyone in that room had to know that it was a lie.

"The Jeffersonian is no longer working the case," Hacker said. He held up his hand. "I know that they are one of the best labs in the country, but under the circumstances we don't feel they're the best lab. The FBI labs will assume control."

"Sir, they know Pellant," Booth protested. "They're highly motivated to . . . ."

"No." Hacker rose to his full height and brooked no argument. "I sympathize, Agent Booth. We want this animal. We are not going to let anything, and I mean, anything, get in the way of a conviction when we do nail him. The Jeffersonian can be there when we nail him to the wall, but until we do, they will have to settle for reviewing the evidence and the findings."

"C'mon, Booth." Sweets looked all of his years and then some. "I'll drive you to the Jeffersonian to pick up your daughter."

oOo

He held Christine to his chest and stared at her mother through the window. He'd seen in her various guises over the years—a scientist, a partner, a lover, a mother, a friend—but he had never seen her like this.

Her limbs and body seemed to be in a chaotic dance across the bedclothes, caught up in arrhythmic spasms to some frantic music in her head.

Hodgins was already holding Angela who had turned away from the sight, comforting her as best he could. Cam stood at his side. "They're going to try some anti-seizure medications. . . ."

He closed his eyes, the music-less dance in the room nothing at all like their dance that morning.

"There have been a lot of advances in understanding seizures over the past. . . ."

He let Sweets drone on. He'd already heard from the doctors, heard the prognosis, heard the truth in their tones.

"Enough," he said. His voice cut through the silence he'd earned, cut through the gentle babbling of his daughter, cut through everything.

He could sense their eyes on him even as his partner's limbs only twitched as they slowly eased down from their exertion. A nurse was putting a needle to her arm and he saw the spirit of the woman he loved disappear into a fretful sleep.

She'd be a pincushion before the doctors figured it out, crippled by her body, damning that magnificent brain to short, lucid periods.

"Enough," he repeated. "That bastard's played with us enough."

"Do you want me to take her tonight, Booth?" He heard Angela's words trying to ease his sorrow and his pain, but nothing would. "Booth?"

"Yeah, please," he managed, bending to kiss his daughter's forehead. "I'd like to stay with Bones tonight."

"Then tomorrow we're going to go over everything again and find something to get this bastard."

Cam's tone defied the FBI, dared Pellant and gave him the most irrational thing he most needed, hope.

"I still have some of the scrapings I took and some samples," Hodgins added. "I was running them when the FBI came to take the body."

"Anything I can do to help," Sweets offered. "You know that."

"I'm not FBI anymore, Sweets." Booth said. "This is personal."

oOo

He'd felt something in his gut the moment they saw the body. Both Cam and Brennan had bent to the body draped across the footpath and he knew.

He knew.

Pellant was challenging them, leaving his twisted messages and mutilated corpses as puzzle pieces in some giant picture of catch me if you can. His blood-soaked messages signaled the next act in his sick game.

The feeling had gnawed at him, made him forego lunch at the diner to bring something to the lab and watch as they examined the body.

He'd long since given up going to the lab to watch the long, slow, methodical examinations of the bodies because he really didn't have the patience for it. Or the stomach. Shaw was running down evidence from the field at the Hoover and he'd sent agents to go keep an eye on Pellant and he was directionless until they had an ID.

He watched as they did their examination, Cam to her flesh and Bones to her bones and he wondered what the lesson was in this latest message from Pellant.

"Dr. Brennan?"

Bones had bent to the chest, her gloved fingers dancing across the rib cage, her eyes focused on what had caught Cam's attention.

Even Hodgins had bent to look.

"I wouldn't put it past this guy to put some kind of booby trap in the body," he had announced. "Some kind of explosive device."

"He had proved to be very resourceful in the past." Bones' hand hovered above the breastbone still partly clothed in flesh. She put a tweezer to the object that had drawn their attention and pulled.

"There's no indication of any kind of anything in this body except that," Cam had said nodding toward the object drawing in Bones' attention.

"It's another bone—a phalange." Bones had been staring at the object. "This victim is male, but this phalange is smaller, consistent with that of a female."

"So there's another body," Cam had said. None of them liked that scenario.

"Do we have enough to ID this guy?" He wanted something, anything he could use when he talked to Pellant. "C'mon, can't you do some of your scientific mumbo jumbo and get me an ID?"

"I concur with Dr. Saroyan that we should be cautious, Booth." In Bones' eyes was a plea to understand. "Pellant is resourceful enough to know how we conduct forensic examinations of the remains. He's obviously trying to send us a message."

"A photo? Anything?"

She had sighed and picked up the camera on a side table and aimed it at the face. She'd indulged him by snapping images from various angles when some kind of explosion tore apart the head of the body sending some kind of electrical arc toward her.

It was difficult to remember which had fallen harder—Brennan or the camera.

Or his heart.


	3. Brennan: Independence lost

**Brennan: Independence Lost**

**A/N: This is a series of vignettes, one-shots, if you will, speculating on the finale. **

**oOo**

The nightmare engulfed her. The flood of childhood memories had been replaced by dreams of a different childhood, the one in which parents and brother had disappeared and families of strangers had taken their places. In this world, she was prisoner, trapped in a trunk of broken dishes, unable to breathe, unable to extricate herself.

Paralyzed.

Her mind clawed its way out of the dream and into the darkness of her bedroom, her breath coming in hard, fast and ragged. For several minutes she fought for breath, fought to push down the images still trailing her into wakefulness.

Somehow, throughout the trauma, Booth remained asleep, his soft snuffling giving her some idea of just how deeply he slept, free from care.

Rising from the bed, she pulled her robe from the chair and softly padded toward the nursery. Christine, too, was deep asleep, untroubled by the events of the day that had sucked away her own peace of mind.

She was broke.

Somehow Christopher Pellant had engineered a cyber-revolution that had looted her bank accounts and destroyed her investment accounts and had left her financially bereft.

In general, she gave little thought about money. It had afforded her a good lifestyle, made it possible for her to travel first class, buy museum-quality artifacts, purchase the house and pay off the small army of workmen who had been needed to renovate it before Christine's birth. Having plenty of money had made it possible for her to not think about money. She could, and usually did, buy whatever she wanted to buy—although living with Booth had sometimes made her shelve her habit of buying the top of the line items out of deference to him.

Her salary from the Jeffersonian remained untouched and she could expect a paycheck in, what, a week, or was it two weeks? But the money she had earned as a consultant to the FBI, and more importantly, the money she had earned as a novelist, the millions of dollars she had earned to save or to invest or to donate was gone.

And somehow she felt trapped.

The house, this living arrangement, Booth, her daughter—all of these were more manageable given her wealth. It made no rational sense that money—something she gave little thought to on a daily basis—could suddenly make her question everything she had.

"She awake?"

Booth stood at the doorway to the nursery in his boxer shorts and T-shirt and scratched at his chin.

"No," she sighed. "I couldn't sleep."

He stepped into the room and bent over the crib, picking up the small plush dog from the mattress. It rattled and squeaked and made all kinds of noises that a dog did not make. At least it was black and white.

"We're okay, you know," he said. "Money wise."

She said nothing because there was nothing to say. The house was paid for, the renovations and moving expenses had all been met. They had enough food and diapers and her Jeffersonian salary could cover the utilities.

They weren't wanting.

"Bones?"

He reminded her about the forensic accountant and how the FBI had some of the finest experts in tracking down financial records.

"It's just money, Booth."

Somehow the words meant everything and nothing and something niggled at the edges of her mind, something she couldn't quite make sense of. And she was good, very good at making sense of things.

But not this.

"We're going to get Pellant, Bones."

The reassurances were the same kind of reassurances she had been given as a child, as a ward of the state. _"It'll be fine, dear. They'll take care of you." _But she had discovered that the only person she could rely on, the only person who took care of her was herself.

And when Pellant took away her bank accounts and her investments and erased the trust fund for Christine and the monies she had set aside for Booth and Parker and her brother and his family and her father. . . .

"It's only money, Booth."

oOo

More than once she had thought about running away and looking for her parents, but with no clues she had had no where to go, no where to look. Running away from the insensitive, the apathetic, the abusive foster parents, well, that was always a different matter.

She had never really had money, so she had made do with whatever resources were available to her.

As a student, she had lived off of scholarships and tutoring and working part-time. She'd never made much, but she had earned enough to pay for the things she needed, some of the things she wanted. It had been enough.

As an adult, her work at the Jeffersonian had afforded her opportunities to earn more as a consultant to the FBI and the Pentagon and the State Department.

And Homeland Security. Somehow, overnight, when the United States had needed Homeland Security, she had become an invaluable consultant and her salary had practically doubled.

But when her first book had taken over the top of the best seller's list and her editor had presented her with both a check and the business card of a financial adviser, she had reached beyond a museum salary and government supplements.

It was logical that she would be upset over the loss of money that by all rights was hers. It was logical that she would be troubled.

She could practically feel Booth worrying about her. He'd done his best to reassure her even as he pinched pennies and used those damned coupons to buy baby shampoo and frozen vegetables and breakfast cereal.

But his words could do nothing to counter the most dangerous thoughts in her head: Pellant had exposed a vulnerable spot that even she had not known existed.

Sweets tossed out his theories of what she was feeling and Cam and the others looked at her in the same way that some of her foster parents had looked at her—with pity.

It made no rational sense that a person who thought little of her wealth daily would feel so fearful without it. As prescribed by her financial adviser, she dutifully sat down with him quarterly to review her portfolio. She made regular contributions to charities and educational trusts, but never doubted that money would be there for other purchases—extravagant or necessary. Money equaled comfort and she saw nothing wrong with being comfortable and ensuring a comfortable future for herself and for her family and loved ones.

Yet only Hodgins had really touched on what was really at issue here, what really mattered.

Jack Hodgins, with all of his conspiracy theories, and wild, unscientific imaginings, had exposed the most troubling of all notions that, as irrational as it might seem to her at some level, seemed utterly rational—if Christopher Pellant could pinpoint and erase her money, couldn't he also plant something equally as devastating? Or locate something darker, more troubling in a person's past?

oOo

With information seemingly doubling and tripling every few weeks, only computers can handle the storage and organization of that information. Even her own life is increasingly dependent on computers—she Googles cultural references and infant care information and sources of that old train set Booth seems keen on. How much of one's life can be unlocked by looking at a search history?

She is all too keenly aware of just how much of her life depends upon computers in the next few days. Her car records information about fuel consumption and routes she's used her GPS for. The house meters—water and electricity and gas—dutifully record usage levels. Her phone tracks her movements. Her ID card registers her presence in various locations within the Jeffersonian—from the parking garage to the archive library.

She is leaving a trail of bread crumbs for someone like Pellant to follow.

The man without a computer, without computer access, has somehow used a computer to tap into her life and destroy bits of it. The forensic accountants are stumped by how he's managed to do what he's done. Angela has been trying to follow along, but even she gets lost in the labyrinth of details.

Her professional life has always stood for supreme rationality and superior work and she has little doubt that Pellant cannot erase the very words marking her accomplishments recorded in ink in thousands of documents.

But her electronic life—the one marking her compensation for those accomplishments—is horribly twisted and she has little hope of seeing any of the millions that are lost.

The twists become even more convoluted when articles that once bore her name now appear online under the names of other people or disappear entirely.

Angela's quip that maybe her publisher should pay her in cash—meant to offer her some comfort somehow—becomes a moot point as her books disappear from online sites.

Dr. Temperance Brennan disappears from the cyberworld.

The attack is dizzying in how complete it is. In one hour, the Google hits which once totaled 2.9 million, begin a downward spiral halving, then halving again like a radioactive isotope until her name is little more than a mere atomic particle.

She is losing who she is.

Like the money, she has taken her fame as an author and her renown in the world of anthropology as a given. But as her name disappears from the Internet, as the cracks begin to show in her demeanor, in her rationality, she begins to recognize something that Booth has said and Cam has repeated and now she fears.

Pellant is smarter than she is.

Whatever she is.

Booth exhorts her to think of something and all she can do is put the baby to her breast and hold onto that. Christine knows no better than that she is a vessel for food, and her touch, her strength, her movements will all provide for her emotional and her physical needs.

But she has examined the clues that Pellant has left them, seen the total annihilation of Temperance Brennan's financial records, her author's credits, her place in the world and she wonders how she can possibly beat him.

She is no longer the smartest one in the room.

oOo

With garbage bag in hand, she would go from foster parent to foster parent, angry and sad and alone, so all alone, and she would take out what she needed each day and leave the bag open to lessen the smell of abandonment.

She reads everything about Pellant, reads Sweets' profile and the others' reports.  
She retraces all his actions, reads all the transcripts of interviews and of testimony.

He is a new dig, a new inquiry into the meaning of what it is to be human.

Booth is the second one to see the cracks in who she is; she sees them first in the mirror, in the darkness, in the quiet moments that are anything but quiet as her brain stages a coup trying to oust emotion from every fiber of her being. She has shed her imperviousness, her suit of armor to don a new one which allows for love, for feeling, for the tiny being who will someday call her mommy. But has she been wrong all along?

Does someone with her IQ, her capacity for knowledge, her gifts, have the right to have a family, a home, a life beyond academia? She can find her name in the _Journal of Forensic Anthropology_, on Amazon—for even Christopher Pellant cannot erase her entirely from e-commerce—but she is becoming a footnote in cyber history.

A cipher.

A colleague calls looking for an article she wrote on using bone anomalies to identify a woman who had been crushed by a building and he jokes about how he can't seem to find it in the library. And she irrationally begins to wonder if she is disappearing from there as well.

His tone, she recognizes, but not the woman who goes to her file cabinet and searches for that same article as if to prove that she wrote it, that she exists still in the annals of anthropology.

She shelves the magazine with the others, and realizes that they need to shelve the original body, too, because none of them can put the murder on Pellant. He is much too smart for them. For her.

She'd been running on bits of sleep puzzled together between taking care of Christine and loving Booth and eating and working and none of it is enough. She hates speculation and worry makes no rational sense, but she worries whom Pellant will make his next victim.

oOo

Days later, Pellant claims that other victim. As the handcuffs are clicked around her wrists, she shudders at the feel of cold steel against her skin. Booth is still 45 minutes away interviewing a suspect, but she called Angela to come for Christine. Her daughter may be too young to be cognizant of what is happening, but she refuses to allow Family Services to take her child.

She waits downstairs at the kitchen table, a female officer hovering nearby as detectives swarm upstairs looking for additional evidence. Her DNA was found at the crime scene and she knows that the detectives are looking for clothing to match fibers found there as well.

They've already located a motive.

Over time she has learned the importance of motive, and over time she has accepted that human psychology does play a role in crimes of this kind. Sometimes, too, motive can be more damning than evidence, especially in front of a jury. Booth has taught her that, just as he has taught her the value of love.

It is love and hormones and that special bond between a mother and a child that seems to drive a knife of pain into her the moment she hears Christine's cry.

"She needs to be fed," she says to the detective. "And changed."

Among these strangers she says little else because Christine's cries are persuasive enough. She's led upstairs, past officers armed with evidence bags holding her clothes, past a photo Booth put up the other day of the three of them—Parker dangling a small plush dog above Christine's face which radiates pure delight under the smile of her brother. In the photo, she's holding her daughter, the disembodied arms around the child, interchangeable with any other woman of her coloring and build and suddenly the full impact of what is happening slices through her and she practically doubles over with the pain.

When she straightens up, she dons the same impervious mask she wore in foster care, when expression damned her to slaps from one substitute father, when emotion meant a visit to the psychologist or social worker. The mask cracks only for Christine who is indignant and hungry and uncomfortable and she scoops her up as best she can with the handcuffs restricting movement and making the transfer to the changing table awkward.

The officer with her orders the door closed and steps forward to release her hands. "I was always jealous of an octopus when I had my son," she says with a shrug.

The imagery makes no sense to her as she releases Christine from her wet clothes and diaper and tries to clean her off as best she can. Months of caring for her daughter should make her movements automatic, but everything she does seems awkward and clumsy as if she is still shackled.

The officer stands guard at the door while she manages to wriggle Christine into a clean onesie. "At this time of day, she usually takes approximately 12 to 18 minutes in which to be sated," she tells the woman as she takes her daughter into her arms and sits at the chair.

Booth, who twice has been a parent, cannot understand how special this next part is as she bares a breast and watches as Christine nuzzles it before her mouth finds the nipple.

This moment and only this moment becomes her mantra, her focal point, but even Christine's intense gaze is not enough to banish the thoughts roiling in her head.

Pellant has done everything he could in the last week to destroy her. The final blow is an old acquaintance, now dead, the evidence pointing at her guilt in that death. All these things that Pellant has done—the loss of money, the loss of her name, the loss of her liberty—are all done to destroy her.

But she was destroyed once before. She had lost her family and her home and her liberty. And if she could survive that, she can survive this.

Pellant has made a mistake.

No, it is not because she now has a family cobbled together from co-workers and friends and from her own father and brother. No, it is not because she has Booth who will fight to prove her innocent. No, it is not because the evidence which might fit the crime just does not fit her.

No.

His mistake is thinking that humiliating her and locking her away will stop her. All that will do is provide her the means to distance herself, to regain her objectivity and her advantage.

No.

It makes no rational sense especially when so much is against her, when she could see how this was going to play out even before the others could—Booth and the police and even Hodgins with his wild conspiracy theories. It makes no rational sense, but she will prove her innocence, regain her life and her liberty for the one person who matters most.

Pellant might be smarter than she is, and he might have his reasons for doing what he has done, but his mistake is clear: he can destroy how she is perceived, but not the essence of who she is, or what she does.

And the person who matters the most, the person who she would give her life and all she is to keep safe, rests in her arms, struggling to stay awake despite her full belly.


	4. Caroline: A timeout

**Caroline Julian: Timeout Goddess**

**A/N:** _Again, these are speculative vignettes, nothing more. If you've already been spoiled, then my apologies, but I couldn't resist. If you haven't been spoiled, your chances of being spoiled here are pretty slim. Really. My track record for guessing is pretty shaky._

_By the by, I think angst describes this story. Granted, it's a different kind of angst. _

_Bones, the TV show, belongs to others. _

oOo

In a word, he was hoping it was only a timeout.

It had to be, right? The Justice Department has a computer glitch that becomes a belch that becomes a tsunami that spews forth one federal prosecutor and claims she's unable to work for the government anymore because of some kind of bureaucratic nonsense that calls into question her integrity and her record.

"I'm under investigation for taking bribes," the woman said as she breezed past the open door of his home and stormed toward the living room. "Funny thing is, if I were to take a bribe, I certainly wouldn't put that money into a bank account where it could be traced from hither and yonder by any first year accounting major."

"Hello, Caroline," Booth said as he shut the door and followed her into his living room where she was taking stock of the place.

"It looks like a yard sale spit up on an art gallery," Caroline said as she peered at the broken airplane wing hanging from the wall just a few inches from a Peruvian marriage jug. "Hhumphf," she snorted and shook her head. "One man's trash is just trash no matter where you hang it."

"Caroline," he started, "what are you doing here?"

"Pending review of my financial records, my bank account is frozen, my investment portfolio is sealed and I can't get into my condominium because I misplaced my key." Despite being at least a head and a half shorter than he was, she seemed a giant. "Oh, I didn't misplace it. Seems my condominium association has some kind of morals clause forbidding federal prosecutor's wrongly accused of wrongdoing from living among the more pure of spirit."

"What are you. . . ?"

"It all stems from that nasty piece of business with Judge Sodom and his girlfriend Gomorrah last year."

"Sodom and Gomorrah are two towns in the Bible. . . ." Bones had quietly entered the room and was trying to make sense of the storm that was Caroline.

"I was making a joke, Cherie," Caroline said. "Ha."

He'd never really seen Bones rattled much, but Caroline Julian was doing a good job of confusing her.

Hell, she was confusing him.

"I heard about the investigation, Caroline, but it's just another one of Pellant's games."

"Which you've yet to shut down, Booth."

The way she said his name sounded like a curse. He wondered if confession would help remove it, but he wasn't sure what he'd done wrong.

"We're still compiling evidence," Bones tried to shore up the investigation. "Pellant is resourceful."

"And maybe smarter than you?"

"He's not smar. . . ."

"I hear you need a babysitter for that little one of yours. Got kicked out of daycare or some such nonsense. In my experience it is the parents who get kicked out of daycare. What kind of trouble can a child no bigger than a few months get into? All a child does at that age is sleep, pee and poop with an occasional cry for her mommy or her daddy. Keeps the parents honest."

"What? Are you offering to babysit Christine?"

Bones got it long before he did. Her face was scrunched up in confusion and something else he couldn't quite pinpoint.

"You need someone to keep an eye on that little one and teach you how to take care of her properly," Caroline said. "Not sure why you didn't call me. I've had experience raising a little girl. You scientist types tend to measure and put the child on your time when, in fact, your little Brennan knows best."

He was about to protest something—_was it the little Brennan remark?—_when Caroline hired herself on the spot.

"Now where's this little one's room so I can take care of her?"

oOo

Granted, they _were_ _hard_ on babysitters. Crime scenes popped up at all hours of the day and night, and almost invariably bony bits were sticking out and he and Bones were needed. Both the lab and the FBI worked 24-7 and inspiration followed the same timetable that crimes did. Witnesses, of course, didn't much care for being rousted out of their beds at 3 a.m., but computers were marvelous things in the wee hours of the day. Then the lab, that gigantic tribute to plexiglass and stainless steel, had millions of dollars worth of machines that didn't have a single clock among them, well, that alone would make it hard on a sitter.

Then there was Bones. Mrs. Noonan of the Jeffersonian daycare had a love-hate, mostly hate, relationship with Bones. Blackmail had worked with him because he needed a forensic anthropologist to make sense of the dead bodies along the way, but Mrs. Noonan did not need Temperance Brennan to keep her daycare running. This was especially true when Bones launched her first salvo—a complaint that the daycare workers hadn't used the organic baby wipes on Christine's tush resulting in a small rash, _redilecto ridiculoso_, or some such thing. Inconvenient, yes. Uncomfortable, yes. A deal breaker?

Mrs. Noonan took it as a sign from above that they were not well-equipped to handle the needs of a child of the world's greatest forensic anthropologist and best-selling author and banned Christine from the daycare _for her own good_.

So, yes, having a live-in babysitter at their beck and call was as much a relief as it was a convenience. No need for a background check—despite the criminal investigation into her finances, Caroline Julian was a good person who had already reared one daughter who graduated at the top of her class at Stanford. Felons and free thinkers alike didn't stand a chance against her.

Neither did they.

oOo

"A little ice cream, Bones?"

A suggestive look at the creamy confection was all it took and somehow, some way, it sparked a sexual revolution in their bedroom that neither one of them minded losing.

"We're out of ice cream, Booth."

He waggled his eyebrows at his partner. "I can think of a different kind of dessert."

"We're out of that, too, Booth."

He glanced at her as she sat ramrod straight on the couch, an anthropology journal propped open on her lap just as the Flyers were about ready to flail the hapless Penguins and she was quibbling about dessert. Not _that kind_ of dessert, he thought, but _that kind_ of dessert.

Even months into this relationship and she could still be a bit too literal.

"I thought we could go upstairs and remove each other's clothes and. . . ."

"I know what you meant, Booth."

He hated competing with an anthropology journal. Just seemed so wrong.

"Caroline's got the baby covered for the night, and I was thinking that the Flyers have the game covered, I could cover you, or uncover you. . . ."

"Booth, I'm not in the mood."

In the year they'd been together, he'd never, ever, heard those words from her. Even 9 months pregnant and her center of balance as unsteady as a three-legged chair, Temperance Brennan was not one to forego sex. He was, but only because the whole pregnancy thing reminded him that his daughter was _in there_ and she had come of out _of there _and it was more awkward than one of her anthropology lessons during a suspect interrogation.

"Is it something I said?" He was taking Sweets' advice and trying to bridge the communication gaps that cropped up. Besides, with a Flyer victory almost inevitable, he was feeling particularly randy. "Or did?"

"We need to work harder to bring Pellant to justice," she offered. "We need to clear Caroline's name."

If he had any qualms about a non sequitir—_see, he was paying attention to his partner_—mention of Caroline's woes, they were forgotten as a cry from Christine rattled the house.

Caroline appeared at the top of the stairs, her attitude like a slap in the face. "You better get yourself up here and find out what is wrong with your little Booth."

Then he saw it. Yes, yes, part of the seeing was because he was paying attention more and more to the Boy Wonder lest he actually go through with his threat and exit his SUV while it was in motion. _"Observation and communication are key components of any relationship," Sweets had intoned just this morning._

He could practically hear Sweets' know-it-all dulcet tones.

Well, he was observing and it just wasn't looking good.

He saw Bones cringe.

She loved Christine—of that, he had no doubt. She loved being a mother. A strange mother, sometimes, but she was a good mother. A really good mother.

But for a split second, he saw the woman who stood up to drug dealers, gang lords and creepy serial killers cringe.

"Well?"

Again, he saw it, the cringe. Maybe a slight tic as well. Caroline stood at the edge of the carpet just as Christine let forth another wail upstairs.

"How can any mother sit down here while her child is crying out for her like that up there?"

To her defense, Bones had already stood and was making her way toward the stairs when Caroline appeared, but the federal prosecutor, used to handing miscreants their blackened souls, wasn't letting her off that easily.

"She's going to need to be changed. You might consider changing brands of laundry detergent since the one you're using now makes my skin itch." She moved her bulk into the living room. "And I hate itchy skin."

He heard the stairs creaking as Bones made her way to the baby's room.

"Booth!" He straightened involuntarily and gave an idle thought as to whether he'd properly picked up the yard out back like she'd asked him. "When are we going to see some movement on this Pellant character? Seems to me that you could be working the case rather than watching those knock-kneed Neanderthals racing around an ice rink on knife blades and passing a chunk of rubber around."

Before he could defend himself, defend the excruciatingly slow movement on the case, she switched subjects on him.

"You need to put ice cream on that grocery list of yours." Caroline was making a beeline for the refrigerator. "And none of that soy milk kind, gives me a rash. And your grocery bills are outrageous. Organic this, organic that. I say what's wrong with a bit of pesticide to keep those creepy crawly things at bay? And you also need some of those almonds I like so much. You know, the kind with the Hawaiian flavor. Just don't get the jalapeno ones, I don't care how much you save with those coupons of yours."

"And who are you two trying to impress with that imported beer? Czechoslovakian Rhapsody or some such nonsense? Although those microbreweries in Wisconsin do have some of the finest. . . you should put Fat Squirrel or One-Eyed Jack on the shopping list."

oOo

He left the Flyers to do their thing, tied 3-3 in the third period, their season in less peril than his own mental health. A week in and Caroline Julian had proved to be Christopher Pellant's most secret of secret weapons against their team. He first tried the baby's room and when the crib was empty he had the most rational of irrational fears pop up—maybe his resident genius and their little genius in the making had hightailed it out of the house for the backwoods and were exploring a means of escape that didn't include him.

His second stop, his bedroom, proved his fears unfounded although what he found there wasn't strictly settling. Brennan was propped up in the bed, the baby in her arms, both of them seeming to pour over an avalanche of documents that had exploded on the bed.

"What's this?" he asked.

Without her eyes breaking their assault on the document in her hand, she answered him. "I'm triple checking the information the FBI has amassed on Pellant."

The baby was looking at him with a curious gaze before recognition set in and she gave him a toothless grin.

"I've got agents working on that, Bones. Sweets has put together a profile. . . ."

"It's not good enough."

Except for Sweets and an occasional suspect, she generally let people finish their sentences. But the snap in her tone surprised him as well and the baby began to connect the dots between them, one worried look at her mother then one directed his way.

"I'm sure Caroline would be touched by your concern for her welfare."

The killer death stare he got for his words told him otherwise.

"I've called Mrs. Noonan and apologized for my actions and I am currently negotiating a 10-part agreement which should allow Christine to return to daycare."

"But I thought you liked the idea of a live-in nanny, even on a temporary basis." He began to undress. "And _you_ called Mrs. Noonan?"

She only had eyes for the documents in her hands, but being the excellent multi-tasker she was (and he somehow missed in bed these days), she continued to update him on the daycare situation. "I acceded to Mrs. Noonan that photographs every half hour were excessive and that my suggestions for Christine's spatial development could be addressed at home more readily than at the daycare where there is limited staffing."

He grinned—he couldn't help but grin. In many ways, his Bones was growing and developing into a well-rounded individual.

He almost wanted to high-fire the baby.

"So we're still going to need a babysitter for the off-hours." He tossed his pants toward the chair. "Caroline can fill in until we get her re-instated."

He got another death glare.

"If we were to get a live-in nanny, I would expect her to actually take care of Christine." The baby seemed to recognize her name and looked toward Brennan. "I knew that I would have to adjust my lifestyle to accommodate yours, Booth. I knew, too, that we would both have to make adjustments for the baby. But I find that I need to draw a metaphorical line at making concessions to our current nanny."

He wriggled his toes in his socks and wondered if he should chance taking them off. Ice cream had not done its usual magic downstairs and he was wondering what other aphrodisiacs he had in his arsenal that might turn the tide.

"So you're trying to solve the Pellant case tonight?" He began to sort the papers on his side of the bed. Brennan was being her usual thorough self. She had made marginal notes on several of the pages. "You want me to put Christine in her crib?"

What Bones wanted was lost in the whoosh of their bedroom door opening as Caroline invaded. "I put together your grocery list," she said waving a long piece of paper that was written on both sides. "You two seem to be out of everything good."

"What are you doing in here?"

Booth stood in just his boxers and T-shirt and wondered how it was that he felt completely naked under Caroline's gaze.

"Well it's good that one of you has the right idea," she said as perused the papers covering the bed. "I'm surprised, Booth, that you're leaving it all to your genius partner to figure out that terrorist. I figured you'd want a hand in it as well." She donned a little girl pout and saw the stricken look on Bones' face and the curious one on his daughter's. "I figured I deserved more attention from the special agent in charge."

Now he really felt naked and felt behind him for something—anything—to cover up. "Caroline, this is our bedroom. . . ."

"I know," she said, swiping at the papers on Bones' side of the bed. "And I saw that the baby wasn't already in for the night so I figured I could join this little skull session. Scootch over." She sat down on Bones' side, causing his partner to follow her directive, if not a bit belatedly, sending both herself and the baby to safer territory in the middle of the bed. "Three heads are better than one." She gave him a withering look. "Unless you're doing your thinking a bit below the Mason Dixon line."

He grabbed the first thing he could, a flowered pillow that he placed in a strategic spot, and began to back up toward the bathroom.

"Well if you have to take care of that little thing, we'll be here discussing our strategy. Seems Dr. Brennan here is more concerned about freeing an innocent woman than the big ol' FBI agent." She snorted her discontent. "You two really need to invest in a little better set of linens. I know you've got your pride, Booth, but really? If you watched for some sales I'm sure you could get some of those nice Egyptian cotton sheets."

Bones shot him a look—_the look_, Christine seemed the perfect picture of "I don't know what this means" and Caroline began directing the charge through the paperwork on the bed while he retreated to the bathroom.

Given everything, it seemed the safest place to be.

oOo

It was well past three when Caroline lumbered off to bed and Bones released their sleeping daughter to her crib. Despite Caroline's help, they seemed no closer to a strategy for unlocking Pellant's secrets and freeing the federal prosecutor from the taint of corruption.

And he seemed no closer to his partner who lay in bed just inches away but who seemed miles, if not centuries, away from him.

Or maybe not.

"Booth, I find that I have a good reason for the two of us to get married."

"Married?" he sputtered. "Married? You mean it? Married?"

"Yes," she said with that tone that meant she had made up her mind and would not be backing down soon.

"You want to get married?" His own tone seemed to be endowed with some sort of Disney magic, filled with wonder and joy at the thought. "Wow! You mean it?"

"I already said I meant it." This tone had a touch of snottiness, like she was annoyed with having to repeat herself.

"Well, I just. . . wow! This is so out of the blue, Bones." He wanted to cover her in kisses and do a few other things to celebrate, but her entire demeanor demanded he understand her reasoning before he launched that parade. "Why do you want to get married now?"

"I have a solution for our present dilemma and it involves an old tradition in law that allows that a husband cannot be forced to testify against his wife. While it seems a rather arcane law, it does seem to serve a purpose at this time."

It took him two clicks before he understood. "Whoa, wait a minute. You want to kill someone? You want to get married so that I won't be able to testify against you?" He sat up in bed and was preparing for a long siege. "I was hoping that we'd get married for more romantic reasons, Bones."

"I find that I, too, would prefer a more romantic reason, but under the circumstances, marriage might actually help us out of our present situation."

"You're acceding that Pellant is smarter than you are?" Wonder and a bit of fear colored his tone. "And you want to get married so that you can kill Pellant?"

"Pellant?" she said. "Who said anything about killing Pellant?"


	5. Booth: Paradise lost

**Booth: Paradise Lost**

**A/N: **_Some more speculation. I guess this is one of those instances that being wrong is okay just as long as the story is entertaining. _

_oOo_

"Go."

When he was a kid he used to play a game with Jared—"Red Light, Green Light." The idea was simple: someone played the traffic light, turned toward the players or away from the players, staggering the time between turns. If you faced the other players and they were still moving up on your position, they had to go back to the starting line. But if you held your back to them for too long and they snuck up behind you and tagged you, you would lose your turn as the traffic signal.

There's no time to explain the game, no time at all. Despite the fact that there's no way she could have killed her friend, the evidence is stacked against her and he can't do anything to protect her once she's processed and in the system.

"Go. Now."

He's come to the lab to tell her that they are about to arrest her and he finds her defying the lab rules, Christine in her arms, her laptop open pouring over the files and the decision he had refused to make is made for him.

"Your dad is at Traveler's Rest, that motel. . . ."

"Why are you telling me this, Booth?"

Despite all that's she's seen and all that she's done, there's still an innocent quality in the question, in her eyes and he's damned if he's going to let them take her to jail for a murder she did not commit. They are playing a perverted game of "Red Light, Green Light" in which he's turned toward the one player and he's praying she'll run right past him.

"You have to go. Take the baby and go, Bones."

She believes in science and truth and they've had an amazing run of it this past year—fighting and loving and making a baby together. Making a family together.

"I can't protect you, Bones." The words slam into him like an iron fist and he finally sees the recognition in her eyes. "You need to go to your father and he'll get you out of D.C. If you stay. . . I can't protect you."

Somehow she shifts the baby in her arms and pulls open her drawer. There's an envelope and a USB drive and she plugs the drive into her laptop and with a few keystrokes, she's taking something for the road.

He recognizes the envelope. Max had asked for a loan for Russ and she had obliged, pulled together almost $20,000 in cash and when she looks up from the laptop he knows that she knows it wasn't a loan for her brother.

The old wily fox knew she would need it.

"Angela's car has a car seat." He opens his hand and puts the keys on the desk. "You took them from her purse." He recites the story that Angela will tell the police once she is gone. "She didn't realize they were missing. You took some cash and her cell phone."

He puts them on the desk and looks up to see her staring at the items. "Angela would have given them to me if I asked, Booth."

"Lose your phone and Angela's. Put the phone on a truck headed in a different direction than the one you and Max take. Do the same with the other. That way. . . ."

"We just need more time, Booth. Pelant planted evidence on the body. . . ."

The baby starts to squirm and she stops just long enough to adjust the position.

"Listen to me, Bones. There's a baby involved, our daughter. If something were to happen to you in jail, I would die." The words are desperate, but true. "Caroline said that you're considered a flight risk. There won't be any bail. They'll arrest you and once you're in jail, anything could happen. I can't protect you."

He's sure they can find the evidence to free her, but how can you free the dead? Pelant is resourceful and smart, wildly smart. He might be more intelligent than Bones and if that is true, God help them all.

"I need you to help figure this out, but you'll be able to protect me if I don't have the two of you to worry about."

"I don't understand, Booth." He begins to see the stubbornness creep in and that won't stand, not now. "I can't protect you if I'm with my father."

"I love you. I need you to trust me on this one. You need to go to your father and let him help you disappear for a while. Please, Bones. Please do this for me."

There's a moment's more hesitation, then the slow nod.

She pulls him into a kiss and he savors it even if the position is awkward given the baby in between them.

"Go."

It's not quite the game he played with Jared in the dusk on the street with the other kids on the block. Some played it as if it were life or death back then, but he knows better now.

She grabs up the USB drive and tucks that into her pocket. He manages to kiss Christine's forehead and gives her one last look before he bends to help Brennan with the diaper bag and her own bag.

"Booth?"

It's not supposed to play out this way. They are the good guys. They are supposed to raise their daughter and grow old together and somehow have the family that both of them were denied.

"I know you love me, Bones. Take care of our little one."

There's the fierce resolve he's seen before and she practically launches herself at him again and he clutches at her while kissing her again.

When it's over he is spent.

"Act naturally. Nothing's wrong. You should be able to get out of the parking structure without a problem."

He tells her to listen to Max—he knows this new life she'll be living because he's lived it before.

"It won't be easy with the baby, Booth."

The baby changes everything, complicates everything, but it can't be helped. He'll manage better alone. Max will be there for both Bones and the baby and he would be damned before he'd ask her to leave their daughter behind.

It might kill her.

"I came to talk to you about the Jeffries case and needing diapers and then I went to go talk to Cam. When I came back to the office, you were gone. You left a note that you were going to stop off at the store for some diapers and whatnot."

She nods. They have to construct his story as well. Plausible deniability.

He's watched her hundreds of times walk away from him. This time it is a bullet to the heart as he walks away from her.

"I need to talk to Cam," he says at the door. A tech he's seen before gives him a nod. "I'll see you at home."

He makes the turn toward the Autopsy Lab and wants to turn around and freeze the players and remember her and his daughter forever that way, but he can't do that to her or to them. She's on the move with his back turned and he prays she'll somehow figure out a way to play the game and win because they've just thrown out all the rules.

oOo

He's on the periphery of the investigation with Bones' disappearance. He's helped his own story by cooperating fully, but he knows the FBI doesn't trust him and deep down inside he doesn't blame them.

But he wouldn't change what he's done.

He's freed up his evenings to study the case files, to look for something they've missed. But what he misses most are the cries of his daughter, her toothless smile, her cooing and her laughing.

And he misses Bones.

Every sound in the house is magnified now in the silence and he wonders how long he'll be able to stay here before it gets to be too much. Everywhere he looks there are reminders of her.

One night he goes to the Founding Fathers for a drink with Cam and Sweets. They talk around Bones' disappearance, but it's only when Sweets calls these "skull sessions" during a particularly hazy night that he realizes he can't afford to get sloppy.

Pelant might be quiet for now, but he's still out there.

He adds an extra night at the gym, an extra night of target practice. Sometimes he wistfully checks the for sale section of the local papers and looks for an old Mustang or muscle car. He's got a driveway and a garage now and he imagines himself parked there Saturday mornings under the hood bringing one of those bad beauties back to life, Bones telling him the anthropological significance of combustion engines or some such thing and driving off with the top down and the baby in the back seat.

But that will have to wait. He's in a holding pattern, his face turned toward Pelant and he's waiting for a misstep.

Only thing is, he's afraid it might be his.

oOo

The photos come in the mail to the neighbor's house under his name and he's damned if he's going to report this to the FBI. Christine looks happy and healthy and so much bigger than he remembers. The photos are organized by date and they look like one of those flip books one of the more artsy kids in grade school would make. His thumb lets each photo past and the effect is dazzling—his daughter smiles and laughs and falls asleep then wakes again making a face that makes him smile.

There's a smudged postmark over the stamps and the printed code on the side of the package runs off the box. He's sure he could hand it over to Angela and get a good idea where his daughter is, but he stuffs the box into his neighbor's pile of recyclables and pockets the photos.

They make the day a bit easier especially when he pulls a murder case in Virginia and Cam brings Dr. Edison along for the ride.

"Heart shaped inlet makes this a male, approximately 30 to 40 years in age. . . ."

The notes are like the notes at a hundred different dump sites but there's something different about hearing someone else's voice run through the identifying markers.

"Do we have a cause of death?"

Figuring out the mystery of it all has lost its appeal under these circumstances. His cases are subject to review, his movements throughout the Hoover seem to be monitored, analyzed, recorded. He's Special Agent in Charge and some days he knows he's in charge of nothing but just getting through the day.

"Looks to be a deep puncture wound to the chest, between the third and fourth rib."

"Punctured the lungs or the heart? Lungs, right?"

He earns nods of approval from both Cam and Clark. "I pay attention."

"You had a good teacher all those years."

It's the first mention of Bones in days and suddenly his eyes sting with tears. "You want this all packed up and shipped back to the Jeffersonian, right?"

His voice is gruffer than it needs to be, but he's trying to battle the loneliness and the worry and the unknown. Mention Bones or the baby and there's a chink in his defenses.

Clark realizes his mistake and he's about to apologize when they are both saved by the phone.

"Booth." Each phone call touches off a small firecracker of fear.

"You get the package?"

He turns from the crime scene. "Matt? It's been a while."

"That's good, Booth." Max's voice makes his stomach do somersaults. "Everything here is fine."

"How's Joy?" He's playing with fire, but he doesn't give a damn right now.

"She's fine. So's baby Ruth. They both send their love."

"I expect there's a reason you're calling? I'm not much into dining out these days." Cam and Clark are glancing his way.

"Joy wanted to make sure you're doing well given the situation and all. She's going to send you a card or something. Maybe when you and Tempe are back together we can all have dinner."

He aches to have this all end, but he knows they're playing a dangerous game. "Give them my love. I hope we'll get together soon."

When the call ends, he keeps his back to the crime scene and tries to collect himself. Max is far too wily to chance the call through the usual means and there has to be a good reason for him to take any kind of risk.

"Seeley?"

He turns to find Cam holding an evidence bag containing a knife. "The techs found this thrown into the bushes."

"The lab will check it against the wounds and you'll tell me if there's a match. Prints, DNA, the works."

He knows the routine and his banter is a bit too breezy for an old friend who knows him too well.

"You really should get out some, Seeley." He's seen the look she gives him from far too many people these days.

He shakes his head. "Cam," he says, "don't start."

There's a beat and her look tells him he's lost his poker face. "I hope they're both well, Booth. I know you miss them."

oOo

When Pelant strikes next he's glad that Brennan and the baby are elsewhere. The deceased is a lawyer who brokered a deal with the Justice Department allowing Joseph Westcott to go free.

Trouble was that Westcott went on to drain the brokerage accounts of several victims before he turned a gun on a young family, killed them, and fled across the border into Mexico.

He gets to see first-hand the crime scene without having to do the paperwork.

"Thanks Booth," Special Agent Benjamin Walker looks a bit green as he leads him back to the body.

There's reason to be green. The bang stick has done its damage. The lawyer's head is practically hanging by a thread of flesh and muscle to his body. His face is forever contorted in pain.

"I think this is your guy's doing," Walker says as he points out one of Pelant's calling cards written in a smeary mess of blood and flesh: Who's next?

"Fits his MO," he agrees. "You've read the profile?"

"Practically memorized it. The guy's seriously angry at the FBI, targeting anybody that could get in his way or anyone who got away with something."

That's how it is. Half the people he talks to at the bureau believe that Pelant's responsible for the dead body that's been credited to Bones. But even Bones would point out that evidence trumps opinion.

Walker bobs his chin toward the body. "I've never worked with the Jeffersonian. They seem out of my league."

Walker's worked almost every kind of case in the bureau over the past 20 years and his admission is as transparent as a crystal vase.

And like that, he's back in.

The story is the same as before—Pelant is tethered to his house by the electronic monitor and while everything fits his profile, nothing sticks to him because nothing so heinous as this murder could be accomplished in 38 seconds.

And like that, they are back at square one.

He hates this game.

oOo

"It was in my inbox this morning."

Max said that Bones would send him something and this is something he'd never expected from her. Enlarged on Angela's screen, the device is surprisingly cobbled together with an assortment of bits and pieces gleaned from items similar to those found in Pelant's home. She's documented everything—the pieces are cataloged on the schematic she's provided and the device looks like it might be the first break in the case.

"The note says that it will replace the signal of the electronic monitor, ping back to the monitoring company." Angela's eyes scan the image Brennan's provided of her solution. "She'd need to figure out the exact signal frequency and coding. The monitoring company's signal is based on an algorithm that alters the coding each time so that it can't be duplicated."

He understands half of what Angela is telling him and even less as Hodgins enthuses about the complexity of what Brennan's done.

"You're sure it's not Pelant messing with you?" Sweets seems to shadow him these days and he hopes the younger man is wrong. "I wouldn't put it past him to put something like this together to show us how clever he is then disappear. That would make him more dangerous."

"That's Brennan's handwriting," Angela counters. "Pelant isn't some master forger now, is he?"

She's earned the right to be a bit snippy with the psychologist. He'd insisted early on that even a genius like Brennan could break down and violate the law when pushed. It was the one and only occasion he was sure he'd have to pull the artist off Sweets.

Just then the security alarm sounds in the lab and he has visions of Hodgins blowing up the lab right as they've found a chink in Pelant's armor. He leads the charge to the door and is surprised to find Hodgins looking just as perplexed as they are.

"Over here."

The security guards are at the Autopsy Lab and Cam is hugging herself just outside the entrance and it's clear she's raised the alarm.

"I got a package with what looks like it could be a bomb inside." She's spooked and he pushes past her to examine it as one of the security guards rolls an acrylic panel between the cardboard box and the gathering crowd.

"It's not a bomb, Dr. Saroyan," Hodgins confirms as he peers through the shield. "That's just a little present from Dr. Brennan."

oOo

The FBI techs take the cardboard box while Hodgins takes the contents.

"She'd need some way of determining the frequency and reading it in her device." Hodgins was warming to the new direction in the investigation. "Then you have to shield the ankle monitor to prevent a duplicate signal."

"I wonder how long it took Pelant to figure it out."

In Sweets' question is a better one—is Pelant smarter than their Brennan? Than all of them put together?

"Dr. B's been gone, what, ten days?" It's clear what side Hodgins is on. "She's got the baby and then she's got to find all the electronic components and test it."

"And she doesn't have the ankle monitor itself," Cam adds. "She's not an electronics expert like Pelant."

It's clear, his genius has upped her game.

"Dr. B's sent us a meter of some sort and these bits." Hodgins holds up pieces of metal bent at right angles.

"Doesn't Pelant have to prevent the ankle monitor from sending a signal?" Angela asks. "Could you shield the ankle monitor with those?"

Hodgins lights up. "Booth can you. . . ."

But he's already on his phone and ready to run down one of those ankle monitors to help Hodgins in his experiment. With Pelant they always had motive and means—well part of means—but opportunity had always eluded them.

Until now.

For the first time in days he feels a glimmer of hope that something will break in their favor.

It's not hard to find someone to pick up a monitor and a technician from the monitoring service to verify their results. Hodgins is in seventh heaven with a new puzzle to solve and Cam retreats to her office with Sweets in tow.

"Booth? You got a minute?"

He follows Angela back to her office and she points him toward her couch. "Brennan sent us something more than the design for that thing Hodgins is playing with." She produces a laptop computer and plugs in a USB drive. "I didn't think it would be a good idea to send it to your office."

Within seconds the screen comes to life with his daughter full of life, squirming with laughter in the arms of Bones. The baby seems like a bundle of pure joy, and Bones?

Her smile is warm and wan and heartbreaking to see.

"She bounced the files around so I couldn't get a good fix on where they originated."

There's nothing in the background to give them away. They are surrounded by shadows and the framing is such that all he can see are the two of them—the family he found and lost and he desperately wants to find again.

oOo

He's not surprised to get the call—Pelant has gone missing.

Walker had swept Pelant's house clean, confiscated bits and pieces that could be cobbled together to outsmart his electronic tether. One of the techs on site, an electronic whiz kid, jerry rigged the pieces into a duplicate signal device.

That wipes the smirk off Pelant's face.

They'd placed the noose around his neck, but with no physical evidence they couldn't tighten it.

It wasn't that Walker got sloppy—he'd been on the night watch himself, had set regularly irregularly patrols and called in a few favors to keep Pelant in their sights. But the little snake had slipped through the cordon and double backed to use his bang stick on Walker.

"Cherie, you know what this means."

Caroline Julian is practically camped in his office when he arrives that morning.

"Good morning to you, too, Caroline."

"That little hacktivist is like a carnival game. You want to smack down that creepy little thing but you don't know what hole he's likely to pop up in next."

He'd been up since 3 a.m. covering the crime scene where Walker's body had been propped up against a tree with another of Pelant's cryptic questions. "I know just how dangerous that guy is, Caroline. Believe me."

Her tone shifts. "I know, Cher. If we had one shred of evidence that put that murder your partner's accused of on our computer geek I would, you know that, right?"

All he can do is nod tiredly.

"Not to speak ill of the dead, but Walker flushed out Pelant," Caroline adds as she turns to leave. "You need to corral that little weasel before he pops up again."

As Caroline sweeps out of his office, he feels a familiar wave of frustration—Pelant has always been steps ahead of them. Now loose, he seems even more dangerous.

He carries the frustration home with him that night and every night that week.

His routine seems etched in stone these days: he scrounges something to eat then he putters around the house before giving up that pretense and planting himself in front of the big screen TV and becoming lost in the sports channels.

The house seems far too big for him and the nights far too long.

He's reminded of that fact when he awakes with a start on his couch, again, the room lights dark and there's no one hovering over him shooing him off to bed. The TV's caught up in some replay of the week's best examples of bad sportsmanship and he taps the remote to end that madness.

The real madness may lay in doing this to himself again—his back agrees, stiff and creaky as he sits up. "Damn it," he says to no one but himself.

Then he remembers. He'd doused the lights in the living room, but he'd left the light on over the island in the kitchen, a kind of night light so he wouldn't stumble to the refrigerator.

He groans and stretches, reaching down under the couch, but his gun is gone. He hasn't quite been sleeping alone of late; he's practically showering with a pistol. The darkened room is now a giant trap and he's certain of only one thing—nothing is certain.

There's the gun safe upstairs and the second one in Bones' office on the first floor and he's trying to calculate his best choice. Pelant is resourceful and he could have booby trapped something along either pathway and he knows all too well just how many different ways someone can be killed.

He's a simple guy who's surrounded himself with geniuses and the voice he hears in his head is Hodgin's, "You're only paranoid if they really aren't out to get you."

Then he feels it—the prick of something cold on his neck and he springs into action grabbing behind him to find warm flesh.

It's over almost before it begins and he's got his hands around the neck of the person he's flipped over the couch, his back screaming the whole while.

"Give me a reason to squeeze, you bastard."

"Seeley, don't."

It takes a moment for the voice to register.

"Max?"

"Booth."

He knows he didn't take Max down and the other voice, husky and breathless, is from the person he's pinned to his living room floor.

The lights blaze on and it takes him only a second to realize his mistake.

"Bones?"

oOo

He almost wants to let Max Keenan have at Christopher Pelant who has been trussed up with duct tape and left on the kitchen floor.

"Duct tape?"

"Tempe didn't think we should kill him."

Pelant should be wide-eyed with fear and babbling, but the clunk on his head's rendered that point moot.

"You know we shouldn't stay, Booth." Max knows the drill. "Tempe's still under suspicion.

This should be over—Pelant's signature weapon, the bang stick, is sitting on the counter. Breaking and entering, criminal trespass, attempted murder of a federal agent—just for starters, a pretty good night's work. Caroline could draw up a longer list by noon.

Bones had disappeared upstairs and he hears her coming back down and half of him wants to plead his case for her to stay, but he knows that part isn't over yet. Even if she turns herself in, she'll be jailed and they'll still be separated and there are no guarantees on the murder charges.

"Where's Christine?"

Max grimaces. "We left her with Angela. We didn't want to make her an accessory, but it couldn't be helped."

"How'd you figure out what Pelant would do?"

"Tempe figured that out. She's been watching the house at night for the past week. Well, we have. One of us in the front and one in the rear." He rubbed a hand over his face. "Gotta tell you, it'll be nice to get a good night's sleep."

His death was meant to flush her out but that showdown between Bones and Pelant has already been won. The good guy's have won.

But when he sees her at the bottom of the stairs, he realizes it's not a complete victory. She's thinner, her hair dyed a darker color. Her eyes, which seem to change with the light, look gray.

The game's not over but she runs the red light into his arms and he clutches her wanting time to stop. But the clock continues to work against them.

It's Max who reminds them it is not a game. "We should go, honey. The police will be here soon and there's no telling what our friend over there knows."

When he releases her and looks at her closely to memorize her, he sees the red marks he put there on her neck. "Bones. . . ."

"Shh." She places her finger on his lips then replaces that with her lips. The kiss is simply too brief. "I left something for you upstairs." He lingers at the back door watching the darkness swallow them.

He wants to follow them, to bring them back and promise that everything will work out somehow, but Pelant begins to stir and he can hear sirens in the distance. The night out his back door has never looked so dark.

Only later, much later—it seems like days later—Pelant is settled in his cell and he's wondering what leverage they've got to force the bastard to admit to murdering Brennan's friend when he makes the discovery, the little something that Brennan left behind.

It's when he's about to crawl into bed that he sees it on his night stand—Bones' dolphin ring. But when he looks closer, it's not the single dolphin chasing its tail, but two dolphins swimming the eternal circle together.

**A/N:** _I was tempted to do one of those choose-your-own-adventure type endings. Problem is, someone's got to write them. I'm not volunteering anything but these:_

_Brennan leaves a ring for him—two dolphins going in different directions and never touching. (Cue saddest music you can think of.)_

_Pelant gets the upper hand and has Max at gun point/bang stick point (doesn't have the same ring, now, does it?) and in negotiating a bloodless settlement, Pelant is allowed to leave and Brennan's still on the lam._

_Booth is woken by gunshots and finds Brennan wounded but alive and Pelant dead. Because she's still a suspect in a murder and the evidence might have died with Pelant, they take a page out of Max's book and take off for other parts to change their names and end up buying a nightclub. . . ._

I don't know about you, but I like the fact that there's a lot of mystery around season 7's finale.


	6. A Terrible Thing to Waste

**B & B: A terrible thing to waste**

**A/N: Thank you to the reviewers who are really lovely people whose words are very much appreciated. **

**It struck me that many people are guessing one thing, but I think it might be far worse for B&B if this goes down another way. They've got to keep both of them in the picture somehow—the show isn't the same when it's Brennan or Booth lite. **

**I have no illusions of being right; in fact, it's just fun to speculate. Just don't know how many of these I've got in me. **

**oOo**

How does a lie become the truth?

When he was a kid, he played that telephone game: lean in and whisper the secret you heard into the ear of the kid next to you and wait as the words make their way around the room. He always remembered the game as being mostly fun; "Charlie owns a goldfish" turned into the nonsensical "Bars need to fold kiss" by the time it reached the last ears in the room.

Only later did he understand that the game was a cautionary tale about how messages could become hopelessly garbled. But when he was a kid, it was sometimes fun to see how misshapen a whispered secret could get.

But this?

"It calls into question her ability to do her job, Cherie," Caroline Julian was saying. "It taints her credibility and the credibility of that multimillion dollar lab of hers."

Someone had printed out the lies in the police files and no matter how many times he opened and closed his eyes as if to blink away the twisted words, they always seemed to come out the same.

"You know her, Caroline. This isn't Bones."

Her whole body seemed to sigh. "Booth, you and I both know that had Deputy Director Kirby of your beloved FBI not been a lying, murdering son of a bitch, I would have had to prosecute your partner for his murder even though we both know that it was her father who stabbed the man to death." She took a deep breath. "Consider this penance for outsmarting the justice system."

He read the words again, but they hadn't changed. "This isn't her. You know that. She didn't do this."

That sigh again. "Cher, I know what I know. But even your brainiac partner would agree that the evidence paints a different picture." She grimaced. "And someone's using the biggest, widest possible paint rollers to create that picture."

"And we're going to need more than a can of whitewash to make this go away."

Now it was his turn to sigh. Caroline wasn't one to mangle the truth. But someone else had, Pelant had.

"The Jeffersonian is going to place her on an indefinite leave of absence at the request of the Department of Justice pending the investigation into that young woman's death." Her eyes were two unchanging marbles. "More than likely she will be arrested and charged and that's when the real fun begins."

oOo

Nothing about this is right. After years of polishing the reputation of the Jeffersonian with her research and her partnership with the FBI, she's banned from their hallowed halls. After years of cooperating with law enforcement and providing hundreds of IDs and hundreds of hours of testimony in the name of justice, her own name is tainted and her reputation ruined when she's arrested for murder.

Just nothing is right about any of it.

The headlines she used to garner for helping solve crimes for the FBI, or for her books, or for her charitable works are now forgotten as more lurid headlines paint her a murderer. Her lawyer, at a cool $165 an hour, only offers a solemn, "hold your head up" as her defense against the reporters who camp outside the courtroom looking for more irony in the twisted tale of the forensic-anthropologist-turned-author-turned murderer.

Nothing is right about any of it.

It's Pops who offers some small comfort, insisting that "right makes might" and that only a fool would think she would kill someone in cold blood.

_Right makes might. _He vaguely remembers reading that line in the tales of King Arthur and his knights, vaguely recalls reading it to Parker one night as Sir Galahad used his sword to exact justice in the kingdom of Camelot. He might have read it before his mother left and his father had perverted the saying to "might makes right" and then beat that message into his body. It might have been Pops who first introduced him to the idea. The message just feels right, just seems to be how they've lived their professional lives, how they've conducted their business these last seven years. It's the core of who they are—being in the right, doing the right thing, having the right intentions—all of those things added up. _Right?_

Right makes might—except when it doesn't.

It's the first time in court for the reading of the charges and he's sitting on the left side of the courtroom on the side of the accused, a side he's unaccustomed to sitting on. He'd brought her dark blue dress to the jail that morning and he'd been hoping it was delivered to her in time for the hearing when she sees her, pale and drawn, as she's escorted into the courtroom. The dress, one she's bought since the pregnancy, hangs loosely around her and he realizes that it's because the belt is missing.

He's sitting on the left side of the courtroom watching as his partner, a woman who has testified hundreds of times over the years to give the murdered dead a voice beyond the grave, is handcuffed and escorted into the courtroom to a noisier reception than she deserves and he realizes just how wrong this is.

He has never known Dr. Temperance Brennan to not do the right thing.

She stands up in court next to her lawyer, handcuffed and stoic, and accepts a scolding glance from the judge before she pronounces herself not guilty.

And it should be enough—her word should be enough for a courtroom in which her word had been enough to convict hundreds of murderers—but it is not.

Right makes might. _Right?_

There's something wrong in all this, something terribly, terribly wrong. The woman has been shot and stabbed and buried alive because she chose to work with him bringing murderers to justice and he's already calculating the cost of the expensive lawyer and the theft of time and reputation and pride when the judge gavels his ruling on bail and leaves the number to linger with the crowd and secure its own headline in the evening papers.

Her notoriety and her profession work against her and even Angela, who is married to the richest man he knows, gasps when the bail is set for $5 million.

Right makes might except when it doesn't.

oOo

One morning he watches as she moves ghostlike about the kitchen in a white terry cloth robe and he thinks, a mind is a terrible thing to waste.

He remembers the slogan from that war on drugs campaign: someone opened an egg above a hot frying pan and the egg sizzled against the hot metal. He couldn't remember if that symbolic salvo had any effect on the drug war except to leave many of his generation with that slogan forever seared into memory.

Looking at his partner, he can only concur: a mind is a terrible thing to waste.

She has stayed to fight the charges against her rather than run and it is costing her. Early on in their romantic relationship, he had gotten a very clear idea of just how far Temperance Brennan stretched. Beyond the lab and the work she did for the FBI, he always knew she did her research and wrote her novels. But in the early months of this more intimate partnership, he'd come to learn of the other demands on her time that he had not paid much attention to before. There had always been the occasional request for her services from Homeland Security or the State Department, but he hadn't really known just how many universities relied on her or how many research grants she had a voice in. She was on this board and that board and rather than be bored by the details, he had simply accepted that Temperance Brennan who now shared his bed had a great mind that was shared with a world broader than his.

But now that has all gone away; a murder charge has that effect.

She is guilty without a benefit of a trial in the eyes of her profession. She could no longer work at the Jeffersonian in any capacity. Forensic anthropology has turned its back on her. She gets the rare call, usually from a colleague overseas, but it isn't enough to sustain her.

That great mind isn't getting enough exercise, of that he is sure.

And even though he knows it is Pelant who is to blame, he feels like he's done this to her somehow. He's argued that she didn't have to reenact her parent's flight from justice—she has a baby and him and friends who will work to reveal the truth. But as days turns into weeks it is all too clear that truth could be as snail-slow as justice.

She might have earned three doctorates and been the brightest star in her profession, but right now, under the cloud of a murder charge, her title means nothing and her star has gone dark.

oOo

He runs a gauntlet every morning at work as a dwindling number of agents or techs ask after his partner.

"How's Dr. Brennan these days?"

Try as he might, he sometimes can't walk fast enough or far enough away from the question. In her defense—_and his_—he offers a "fine" or sometimes a "good" but never a "great."

"So how is she?"

Sweets always finds a way to corner him or get him alone in a room or the elevator before he asks the question.

Fine.

Good.

But never _great_.

There is nothing _great_ about the situation.

"She okay?"

Yes.

Sure.

Never _absolutely_. Never.

She mostly spends her days at home, taking care of Christine, reading, writing and studying every damned piece of evidence in her case.

Her bank accounts have been frozen to prevent her from fleeing the country. Her passport had been surrendered. Her notoriety has earned her a get-out-of-jail card, but it's not free.

She is free to move about as she awaits trial, but notoriety and book sales hem her in. Her older books find themselves riding alongside the latest novel on the best seller list. But each book sold seems to create more curiosity and there's not enough money to erase all the times Temperance Brennan, _author_, or _forensic anthropologist_, or _formerly of the Jeffersonian_, is coupled with _accused in the murder of. . . ._

How is she?

_How is she?_

oOo

He comes home to a clean house and dinner on the table and a woman who is gorgeous and a baby who is adorable and he should be happy.

She's got a man who loves her and a beautiful home and a baby who is pure delight and she should be happy.

They both have friends, _very_ _loyal friends_, and they should be happy.

But the despair deepens and he finds her drinking more wine at dinner.

She's good about the baby—she's still breast feeding and she'll use the breast pump before she takes a drink. She'll make sure the baby is down for her nap in the afternoon before she'll take a drink.

The grocery list always includes a trip down the liquor aisle these days and he obliges because these are extraordinary circumstances.

She's stayed to face justice—_not that she did anything wrong_—refusing to play out her parent's flight, refusing to allow anyone in her family to feel the wounds of abandonment because she knows they don't heal easily.

She's stayed and she's accepted the losses because someday when they can figure out how to catch Pelant: when he makes a mistake, when a witness comes forward, when they figure out how he did it—_and then prove it_—she'll be free to pick up with her life.

Her name still graces anthropology journals and forensic papers and she's still a best-selling author and she should be happy.

She's got a good man who loves her deeply and a child who depends on her and her life has only taken a detour and someday she'll have the other parts of her life back again because right makes might.

So the growing number of bottles in the recycling bin don't bother him. The baby is fed and clean and happy. Food's on the table and the house is clean. The appointments with the doctor and the lawyers are all kept.

He's not concerned when she finishes the bottle after dinner then falls asleep.

These are extraordinary circumstances.

_Extraordinary_.

But how does a lie become the truth?

She has a right to numb the pain. But does this right make might?

The only professional calls come from her publisher and he wants to take advantage of the trial publicity—does she have a new novel in her?

How is it that he doesn't see her merging with the wine? How is it that he doesn't see that by not repeating the mistakes of her parents, she is now channeling his father's drinking?

This is where the lie becomes the truth: He comes home to a clean house and dinner on the table and a woman who is gorgeous and a baby who is adorable and he should be happy. She's got a man who loves her and a beautiful home and a baby who is pure delight and she should be happy. They both have friends, very loyal friends, and they should be happy.

Right makes might and they will win this one because they know the truth.

But a mind is a terrible thing to waste. And lies can easily become the truth.

And when she says something one evening between sips of wine that the bang stick is an efficient means of dying—_not killing someone, but dying—_he begins to count the bottles. He begins to count the days to the trial.

And he begins to count the ways in which they've allowed the lies to become the truth in their lives.

**A/N:** _In the Kathy Reich novels, Temperance Brennan is a recovering alcoholic. Would the show ever go down that road? I know they've never wanted to address Brennan or Zach and the possibility that one or both of them have Asperger's, and they've never really gone down the dark, dark corridor of Booth's gambling problem, always opting for lighter fare. Who knows what evil lurks in the Harts of men? (Couldn't resist.)_


End file.
